“After a silence dictated by shame, pain and politics that lasted the better part of a century, the suffering of Armenians massacred by the Ottoman Turks and their Kurdish allies during World War I has recently become an urgent issue.”

“Chris Abani has done an end-run around the immigrant novel. In two previous books, Abani, who was born in Nigeria, traced a path from third world to first: “GraceLand,” his bustling novel set in Lagos, closed with a young man’s departure for the United States; his novella “Becoming Abigail” followed the title character from Nigeria to London.”

“Anyone with a claim to literacy is familiar with the names of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, and can cite some of the titles of their most famous works. But Goncharov and his novel Oblomov, of which a new translation, a snappily colloquial and readable one, has just been published — who ever heard of them?”

” Many readers will remember Isabel Allende’s bestselling The House of Spirits, her 1982 debut novel about a 20th-century family living in the unnamed country that represented her native Chile. In her latest work of historical fiction, Allende reaches back to the 16th century to recount the adventures of the real-life Inés Suarez, one of the few Spanish women who participated in Spain’s conquest of the New World and who is considered by some the founding mother of Chile. ”

“Louis Begley’s latest novel, “Matters of Honor,” is a kind of pale, male version of Mary McCarthy’s novel “The Group” — moved from Vassar to Harvard, from the class of 1933 to the class of 1950-something. It is also devoid of McCarthy’s biting, satirical wit and keen eye for social distinctions; none of its central protagonists emerges as a compelling or even believable individual.”

“This immense, demanding novel can be recommended, with scarcely a cavil, to well-educated Indians who have lots of free time, are fluent in (at the very least) English and Hindi, and have a thorough knowledge of South Asian politics; Hindu, Muslim and Sikh religious practices; and the stars and story lines of hundreds of Bollywood films.”

“Within the revolution, everything; outside the revolution, nothing,” has long been a favorite saying of Fidel Castro’s, the memorable, simple-sounding formula he has cited when he has felt the need to silence a critic, justify an apparently indefensible repressive measure or simply remind Cubans that his all-seeing eye is ever upon them.”

“Doris Lessing has always been a novelist enthralled as much by ideas as people and, in her latest book, she more or less does away with people altogether. To be strictly accurate, her latest book is set among a race of pre-people, as they emerge fumblingly into what we might think of as people-hood.”

“According to the Jewish calendar, the day begins at sundown. This runs counter to the way most people experience time, but it makes a peculiar sense in the novels of A.B. Yehoshua, in which the most important activities almost always take place at night, and the main characters are insomniacs, either by choice or by compulsion.”

“I had hired the new Hungarian florist in town to do the flower arrangement,” the narrator of Vendela Vida’s new novel says of her father’s funeral. “A mistake. A ruby banner hung diagonally, like a beauty contestant’s sash, across a garish bouquet near the casket. In large silver lettering: BE LOVED.” ”